A Preliminary Report on Some Unpublished Mosaics in Hagia Sophia: Season of 1950 of the Byzantine Institute

Abstract

Despite the severe losses suffered during the spring and summer of 1950, first with the death of its President, Robert P. Blake, Professor of Byzantine History at Harvard University, and a little later of Professor Thomas Whittemore, its founder, Director, and moving spirit for so many years, the Byzantine Institute was nevertheless able to carry forward its work in Istanbul. From late July to early November work was conducted in three former churches now established as museums under the charge of the Ministry of Public Instruction of the Turkish Republic. In this campaign the same facilities, encouragement, and courtesies that had been afforded Professor Whittemore were graciously extended by the Turkish government to the author of this report. While continuing the rehabilitation of the extensive mosaic cycles at the Kahrieh Djami (formerly the monastic church of St. Saviour in the Chora) which was begun in 1948, new work was undertaken at the Church of the Theotokos Pammakaristos (Fetiyeh Djami). The subject of this report concerns the third project of the season: the investigation, preservation, and cleaning of some mosaic fragments in a large vaulted chamber which lies, as a second story, immediately above the entrance vestibule of the great church of Hagia Sophia (pl. 17). The room, whose floor is approximately at gallery level, can be entered at present only through the great doorway at the southern end of the axis of the West Gallery. Above the door, inside the room, the semi-circular tympanum contains fragments of two of its original three figures in mosaic. Elsewhere in the room, at scattered points in the vaults, are fragments of fourteen other figures, many of them the merest bits and pieces, and all adhering to the masonry in a most precarious manner. These mosaics have never been covered with plaster or obscured by white-wash. They seem, however, to have been mentioned only twice in published works. The first is an allusion by Salzenberg to the mosaics above the door, without any identification of the figures, and a statement by the same author that the vaults were ornamented with mosaic figures, one of which he illustrated in a drawing, again without identification.' The second is contained in a document published in 1902 by G. P. Beglery Is in which a visitor to the galleries in 1847 claims to have seen a Deesis and full length figures of the Twelve Apostles. Today, of the fragments of sixteen figures it is possible to identify twelve, mostly by means of deciphering inscriptions in the plaster setting-bed. The forms of the vaults and the irregular shape of the room are presented in the preliminary measured drawing reproduced in the accompanying plate (pl. 17).2 Since the main purpose of the drawing is to present the mosaics in their true forms and dimensions and show their positions in the room, the longitudinal sections are drawn as though the rounded vaults were flat vertical planes that continue the vertical planes of the walls.3 Longitudinally the room is divided into three bays separated from one another by arches. The first bay, which contains no surviving mosaics, was originally a simple barrel-vault. Its eastern half seems subsequently to have been rendered somewhat irregular by later repairs. The second and third bays, while giving the effect of barrel-vaults, are slightly domed along the ridge, their bricks are laid in the manner of groin-vaults with the groins flattened out, and the walls below them penetrate vertically beyond the spring lines to form a lunette in each side of each bay, thus providing a total of four lunette penetrations. These two southern bays form a unit and together stand in contrast to the first. It will be seen that in their iconographic program the two southern bays were treated as a continuum and must have formed a unit within the program of the whole. Adhering to the masonry are five patches of plaster, each containing smaller areas of mosaic tesserae. The first, in the tympanum at the northern end (A in plan and sections), contains two figures. The second (at B) presents bits of four figures: the tip of a head which once came at the center of the arch separating the first two bays, the shoulders of two busts in the lunette of the second bay, and the foot and lower garments of a figure in a second zone above the traces of an ornamental band. The third patch (at C) is